Subscription costs for apps and services is a part of mainstream life now, and just as developers get the benefits of recurring revenue streams for ongoing development and improvement of their apps, we also get the benefit (if we choose to) of looking at the state of the service, the market they sit in and how much value these things truly bring, then voting with our wallets. In theory…if we sit down and do the work! ¹

That being said, here’s what I subscribe to currently, as well as what’s staying/going in 2024!

🚨 Note: Any monthly subs I’ve put in the yearly price of the sub in my estimates 🚨

Applecare Warranties - £167.76/Year

• AppleCare/Apple Watch Ultra (£59.88/Year) - I think I might risk this and cancel. My old Apple Watch even after 2 years wasn’t even eligible for the battery replacement. This has been the case with my last 3 watches. 👎

• AppleCare/iPhone 15 Pro Max (£107.88/Year) - My phone is one of my most important devices. I can’t risk getting rid of AppleCare. 👍

Streaming/Storage - £697.17/Year

• AppleOne Premier (£443.40/Year) - Ok Ok, hear me out! This subscription gives Apple Music, Apple TV, News+, Fitness and 2TB of Storage to my whole family (Me, My Wife & 2 boys). Un-Bundling or reducing a tier and adding storage saves basically pennies so it’s just not worth it. I really really need to use the fitness components of this in 2024 to make it worth it though. 👍

• Crunchyroll (£59.99/Year) - I’ve really re-discovered my love of Anime this year and the service is pretty cheap. I need my Gundam and Lupin. It’s staying. 👍

• Disney+ (£109.90/Year) - I really enjoyed watching some shows on this. The Bear. The Old Man. The kids watch stuff on it…The movie choice is ok but….that’s a lotta money with the new renewal price… I do prefer it however to….🤷‍♂️

• Netflix (£83.88/Year) - I loathe Netflix. The reduced content, the increase in prices, the restrictions on sharing….but the family love it. I guess it’s staying. 🤷‍♂️

Game Services - £275.87/Year

• Xbox Game Pass £155.88/Year - If I play at least 3 full price games I Would have bought, then it’s worth keeping. Especially for the value the kids get from it as well.👍

• Playstation Plus Premium £119.99 - Took this out on a discounted rate. The service is hot garbage. Absolutely not worth the price. It’s gone. 👎

Apps - £183.44/Year

• Sofa £29.99/Year - Bought on a discounted rate. Won’t renew. It’s clunky, complex and I always feel like I’m wrestling against it vs it helping me. It seems MacStories has moved onto Sequel which seems more streamlined, has more interesting features and is cheaper. Think I’ll switcheroo. 👎

• Final Cut Pro £49.99 - I tried to be a video editor. I am not. Easy cancel. Back to iMovie. 👎

• Footpath £21.49/Year - I need to actually use it more in 2024 to justify it. It’s an elegant piece of software. It’s well priced for what it does. It stays for 2024. 👍

• Lose It £34.99/Year - What would Jan be without another attempt at weight loss. It appears they’ve added IF features to it now as well. It stays as it’s due for renewal mid-year. We’ll see how I get on with it. 👍

• Ivory £24.99/Year - Probably not a popular opinion, but I don’t feel like it’s justified the price for me personally. I’m not using Mastodon as much at the moment I’m gonna go back to the official app and take my chances whilst I trial some alternatives. 👎

• Bear £13.99/Year Grandfathered - Finally 2.0 came out… aaaaand it’s still a bit clunky, underbaked² and not precisely what I’m looking for. I stuck with you for a damn long time but it’s over. Tagging and linking is clunky, Bear for Web is something I’m just not interested in either. Time to learn Obsidian instead for the grand price of free and move on. 👎

• Infuse 8.99/Year I honestly forgot I was subscribed to this. I don’t use it at all anymore… 👎

Services - £384.90/Year

• YNAB £90/Year - I love it. It helped me create this list and look at costs. It gave me the confidence to plan to quit a job that was harming me, take time off and move myself in a different career. I had that financial confidence due to this app helping me plan. 👍

• ‌Micro.Blog £80-ish - What you’re reading this post on! So it’s gotta stay! I did upgrade to premium for the video hosting, but trying to get something to stay in the small file size limit is more trouble than it’s worth, plus I have no plans to start a podcast or newsletter anytime soon, so I’ll probably go back down to the $50 (£40-ish) plan again and embed my videos via Youtube instead. 👍

• Tinylytics £40-ish/Year - Fun! Elegant and shows me that on occasion someone actually reads the stuff I put on my blog :) Absolutely staying. 👍

• NextDNS £19.90/year - Essential. Adblocking and enhanced security for the whole family. Simple to setup with Apple products and smart. Highly recommend it. 👍

• 1Password £55-ish/Year - I’ve used 1Password since it launched, it’d be ridiculous to stop now. It’s had some ups and downs since it was gobbled up by VC’s but I can’t ever imagine switching. 👍

• Nest Aware £50/Year - I need it for my Next Cameras to use with my Starling Hub to pipe them into HomeKit. Maybe at one point I should look at proper HomeKit cameras instead. 👍

• Microsoft365 £50/Year - I always get this on a deal with some antivirus software which I never even install as it’s cheaper. Family licence and it’s used more by my kids and my wife than me. 👍

Total Costs

Current cost of subscriptions £1709.14/Year or £142.43/Month

Revised cost of subscriptions 1402.31/Year or £116.86/Month.

Potentially we can drop this further if we ditch Disney+ and/or Netflix even for a period of time. Maybe do a few months with one then flip to the other… We’ll see. Still fairly pricy but considering spreading it out over the services and the fact a lot of these don’t just serve me but the whole family… not too bad!

1. Don’t be complacent with your subs! Really contemplate how much value these things give and act accordingly! ↩

2. Finally Tables!….But you can’t sort or re-arrange them. ↩

A tech ghost story told around the campfire on a cold dark night 👻

“And when he unboxed his laptop… IT DIDN’T HAVE A PHYSICAL ESCAPE KEY” 🎃😜

Farewell to the MacBook Pro Touch Bar

I didn’t get this out last week as life just got in the way, so this is a sorta doubled up bumper pack of last week and this weeks stuff.

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It’s all about tech mostly this week. With a little bit of food thrown in. And of course the weather, because what sort of Brit would I be if I didn’t mention it…

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Apple announced at their Wanderlust conference that they were ditching leather accessories due to the environmental impact of the materials at the scales the must produce them. Instead, the official premium cases will be made from a material they refer to as “Finewoven”. Mine arrived the other day, so lets take a look.

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Here’s my random meandering thoughts from the Apple press conference 🍏

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A hot and busy week for the whole family this week, with the kids starting up at school/college again, hoping we get more into the general rhythm of normalcy next week.

• 🍻 My cutting down my alcohol intake continues this week and I have to say I feel better overall for it. Starting tomorrow I hope to expand into some fitness activities as well! 🏃‍♂️

• 🔨 Speaking of workouts, building new Ikea furniture for the kids yesterday was a multi-hour sweaty affair 😅

• 🍝 Had a great dinner over at a friends house last night. I’m an introvert/wallflower typically and have to be poked by my family into a lot of larger social interactions, but as I grow older I do find myself putting more importance in my friendships and relationships and find myself enjoying them.

• 🏙️ My Bluesky invite finally came through. Installed it. Linked it to my domain. Scrolled the timeline for 5 minutes. Haven’t gone back. I think I’m over Twitter/Threads and that whole sort of social media interaction. I’m engaging with micro.blog more and more as I move away from the social behemoths.

• 🧘‍♂️ We had a little visit to Weymouth beach Friday evening, had a quick splash then ate fish and chips on the harbour. It was so relaxing and uplifting it was almost like a meditation. Much required after the rush of the week.

• 🇯🇵 We find ourselves missing Japan as we are post “big holiday”. I need to keep the Japan Diaries going as I write up each day and edit the photos I took over there. I really enjoy writing them as a reminder of our time there and find it makes the memories more concrete somehow… Only one thing for it, start planning for the next one?! 🤔🇮🇹❓

• 🌎 Finally got all my domains under the same provider, moving the final ones away from a horribly outdated and unsupportive company. I’ve been meaning to do it for years and was dreading the complexity of the transfer process. In reality it was flawless and only took 10 minutes! There’s a lesson to be learned about fearing changes there methinks…

Here’s to cooler weather next week 🤞. Have a good one everybody!

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Tried one of the reddit export tools, seems to have a bug where it doesn’t export all your comments. Doesn’t export posts/images etc, so I’m going to wait until Reddit processes my GDPR request for data before removing my content and account. I want my data wrapped up by them and delivered with a bow.

I’m interested to see exactly what info they have and what you get in the archive… 15 Years I’ve been on that site…

Once I’ve got the data, I will use a script to edit all my content/comments and then bin off the account. Just like Twitter, it feels quite cathartic to disconnect from Reddit, and drift towards micro.blog and Mastodon. I’m actually looking forwards to less but more real interactions vs what these services promote…

I was daydreaming yesterday about my first times on the Web as a 14+ Year old. When the web was IRC, Independent web Forums, Usenet!

Really unique and different communities hosted across a plethora of providers using different software! You could explore the web, find out its secrets and surprises.

When Yahoo! listed web sites by category the web was so small and fresh and exciting.

Man, how much have we let the web get amalgamated by big business? You can still see what it promised if you squint…. but what a lot of it has become? Just kinda makes me sad…

Via the Verge

you can reach out and touch a 1996 pocket computer with your 2022 pocket computer and it works like a charm. It’s a tiny interactive window into the pre-iPhone era, and what lived in the proto-App Store.

I have a lot of nostalgia for the PDA era. Psions, Palm, Pocket PC, before phones became computers and computers became phones. Anyway, if you need me I’ll be playing Space Trader

RE8 & The future of gaming on the Mac

The sad truth is, with all this technical performance and such a superb solution in the M1/M2 chips… Apple will still mess this up by not taking gaming seriously and investing in development and developers.

Apple Arcade is the ultimate expression of dipping a toe on and then not going any further. And the service suffers for it… Netflix of all people, has a more compelling game library on iOS than Apple… how does thst happen?

With Apple not quite getting everything right recently I was actually pleasantly surprised by the iCloud web portal design. Fresh, modern and with lots of good new features. 👍

After joining the update list on 30/10/2020 and putting in my order on 29/07/2021 my Playdate finally arrived 08/05/2022 🎉👏

The playstation 5 would arrive in peoples hands roughly a month after Playdate pre-ordering opened, and whilst I’m still waiting on finding one of those ¹ I’m happy to say Panic have delivered what they promised, even after some bumps in the road.

Playdate has obviously been a labour of love for Panic, and is being made just for fun. It’s kitschy and cute. Artful and functional. It’s a joke made serious. A black and white handheld with a crank in 2022?!

If you’ve ready any stories or watched any videos comparing this to Gameboys or other handheld portables they are waaaaaay off the mark. This is a Tchotchke, a fun little thing, an art project. It’s not a ‘games platform’ it’s not made to ‘shift units’ or gain ‘market share’. If you’re taking this product seriously, you’re kinda missing the point.

Presentation

Just like Panics fine FTP software, the presentation is crisp and clear. Panic have always been a company that is passionate about design and presentation and this shines through the boxes and how the device is presented when you first open it. Yellow shines through the whole presentation.

The unit

Panic worked on the design with teenage engineering. Not being musically talented, Teenage Engineering had kinda of passed me by, but it’s obvious after looking at their offerings that they make absolutely beautiful pieces of hardware.

Their Mini-ITX case makes me contemplate building a PC. Something I haven’t thought of in years.

Whilst it looks like a simple yellow square at first, it’s a system of the small details that all add up. The more you look at it the more you spot the small considerations and how tight the design is. The screws and how they have holes into fit the optional purple case are a part of the units silhouette, creating an identity (Look at the icon on the back of the unit).

The mesh over the speaker case, the metal on the famous crank. It’s a beautiful looking piece of hardware that looks fun and considered at the same time.

USB-C charging is great, and I can’t wait for the stereo dock

The Screen

The display is a 1-bit sharp memory LCD. It’s not e-ink but has some of the same properties when it comes to power use. This means the playdate screen is always on, just like e-ink, so it displays the time/date when at rest (you have a choice of multiple different clocks to display when the unit is at rest.

The display being 1 bit means it’s black or white. No greyscale, so greys are made by dithering patterns onto the screen. This gives games a very distinctive look. People will compare the playdate to gameboys and other early handhelds, but this screen really reminds me of the original black and white Macintosh displays. In some ways, the playdate feels like if hypercard had a games console.

I’ve never seen a display quite like this before. Imagine an original gameboy screen without the smearing, or e-ink without the latency. You have to see it to appreciate it. It runs up to 50fps, but games are typically 30fps and in the right lighting it just looks spectacular. It’s such an odd combination of capabilities.

By right lighting however, I really do mean the right lighting. You absolutely must have a good and direct souce of light on the screen. The screen is reflective and not back-lit. Playing in the open air, at a desk under a screen-bar or in my living room under a lamp are optimal for playing.

You can play in indirect light as well, but you will get an experience similar to the O.G. Gameboy as you find the best angle to play at.

The Crank

The crank is solid and operates….smoothly? How do you describe a crank? It’s an input interface and works really well. Games like WhiteWater Wipeout essentially use it as an analog input. Crankin uses it to fast forward or rewind time, casual birder to cycle your inventory. Is it a gimmick? More of a unique selling point I’d say. There’s gotta be a fishing game in Season 1? ²?

The experience

Registering the playdate is like activating a streaming service on a a streaming box. Log into your account on the play.date website and turn your play.date on. The play-date will generate a code that you put on your account that ties the two together! At this point you’ll receive your first two games and your playdate season 1 will begin!

The Games - Season 1

Playdate comes with an entire season of 24 games made exclusively for playdate from a range of developers. I’ve deliberately not looked too hard into what is included with the season as I want the games to be a surprise and will try and do write-ups on them as they become available. So far into the process I have the first two weeks of games unlocked.

• Whitewater Wipeout - The surfing game from California Games
• Casual Birder - A Zelda like collect ’em up minus the combat
• Crankin presents time travel adventures - From Keita Takahashi!
• Boogie Loops - A Music Sequencer ala fruity loops etc.

The games do seem eclectic, some use the crank, some ignore it. You probably won’t like everything (I have zero interest in Boogie Loops having zero musical talent), but it’s pretty much guaranteed something so far will appeal.

SideLoading

Anyone can develop for playdate and the SDK and documentation are freely available. Several titles have popped up on itch.io with some standouts already out there. Bloom in particular seems one not to miss. There’s no issue charging for your games and side loading is as easy as logging into your playdate account, clicking side-load and dragging the .pdx file containing the application over. This then appears on your download list just like the official Season 1 titles.

Mirror

Panic have also related an application to mirror the screen to a Mac or PC. A must for streamers or to capture images. I plan to use it as I start to write up about the Season 1 games.

Summary

The playdate turned out exactly like I’d hoped. It’s A fun little unique community driven toy you can explore and dig into. I’m excited to see what developers start to create for it as well as exploring the rest of Season 1 as it opens up to me through the next 10 weeks. Couldn’t be happier with the experience!

I plan to write up the weekly games as they come out, as well as review the dock when it’s available.

1. 🤬 ↩

2. I have no idea if there is one, but it’s perfect for a crank right?! ↩

It arrived!

Thinking I will probably write up a review of the hardware, then the season 1 games in real-time as they unlock to me.

My god it’s a cute little tchotchke though 🥰 🎮

Got a new M1 Macbook Pro now apparently a ton have hit the refurb store (Thanks Youtubers everywhere 😜!) First impressions were I immediately love the build quality, the screen is amazing (HDR + ProMotion = Lush)

However, I Instantly run into what is apparently quite a well known problem with absolutely terrible WiFi performance that would drop out at 5Mbps, corrupt downloads and generally be absolutely unbearable.

Initially I was worried I had got a lemon but did some googling online. Thanks to Reddit and Stackoverflow I discovered this initially appeared to be related to having Bluetooth and WiFi enabled at the same time and disabling Bluetooth would resolve the issue.

Pretty unacceptable as I like my wireless headphones 🙄

Some more digging lead me to discover this specifically appears to be related to Apples AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link) protocol.

This runs IP over Bluetooth and (Maybe….appears to….?) run over WiFi as well directly between devices. It runs over interface awdl0

I discovered the issue was instantly solved by shutting the interface down with

sudo ifconfig awdl0 down

but the interface appeared to turn itself on constantly, killing performance again. Some more fiddling, I discovered turning off Airdrop resolved this and now my WiFi has been stable for hours. 👍

Apple hardware is in a fabulous place with the M1 series of chips at the moment. The Macbook Pro returning to an evolution of the pre taskbar years is also very welcome, but dear god how is it possible sofrware problems like this still exist that have a history of being an on-again / off again problem over years and years and years. I could go on about other issues like this in MacOS.

I could come up with dozens of examples of how MacOS still frustrates. It’s 2022 and Podcasts still don’t reliably sync! A podcast app made by one man works absolutely fine…

Anyway, now I’ve wasted my first day of ownership resolving this I’m now off to download my apps and have fun! 👨‍💻

I will leave the long form reviews to those who do it as a living but thought I’d post some of my notes after a weekend with the new device.

The Device Itself

• The new screen is fantastic for HDR content and is ridiculously crisp. Bladerunner 2049 is stunningly good.
• I do notice shadowing around the edge of the screen as the screen does appear to be deeper set due to the Micro LED in the screen. it doesn’t bother me particularly. On my particular unit, the ‘bloom’ problem of Micro LED people have brought up isn’t really noticeable to me.

Not to discount other peoples experiences of the product, but it wouldn’t be a new Apple product launch if there wasn’t a ‘something-gate’ issue for the worst parts of Apple fandom to hand-wring over 🤷‍♂️

• Improved Front Camera with “Centre Stage” is great. I couldn’t care less about the rear cameras. I’ve never taken even a semi-serious photo with an iPad.

• Coming from a 2018 12.9 Pro that was no slouch, the M1 is literally seamless. Switching from application to application and multi tasking (as it is on iPad at present) has zero stutter. The device simply moves out of your way. it’s phenomenal to use.

Accessories

• The new Magic Keyboard case is just as much of a fingerprint/grease magnet as the old one. Just accept without putting a skin over it, it’s going to mark and be done with it. I wish I’d bought the white one. But I’m sure in 6 months after it was worn in I’d think differently.

The future?

We’ll see what iPadOS 15 brings. Scuttlebutt from some is that there’s bigger software changes on the cards that will unlock more magic of the M1 and the increased RAM. I personally think the upgrade will be more conservative than people think, but I do hope for much requested features such as…

• large focus on file management
• Multi-screen support
• Re-worked multi-tasking
• Inclusion of the (Fabulous) Apps Library
• On-Screen Widgets
• Closer synergy of MacOS/iPadOS Applications

I do not think we will see a larger focus on ‘desktop’ style apps or rendering, Nor do I think we’ll see anything like a Samsung DeX experience as some have wanted. I do think we will finally see the Pro-Apps translated to iPadOS.

Summary

Nothing comes closer to the view of the future of computing than what the iPad Pro is. It’s the most adaptable, transformable computer and a true joy to use.

It’s just that vision hasn’t moved forwards considerably hardware wise from the 2018 model. Introduction of mouse support and the Magic keyboard has done a lot of heavy lifting in regards to iPad usability over the past 3 years. Let’s hope WWDC reveals how that will be pushed forwards soon.

Curious to see how this rumoured Apple game subscription service will look.

Apple doesn’t “get’ premium gaming at all and historically doesnt have great relations in that area, so I can’t see them attracting big studios with this. Xbox has a library of games and publisher relationships to co opt.

Apple doesn’t. That’s why bar a few take2 experiments and Rockstar, you don’t get those big name games or ports.

I love indie games and wish there were more premium indie experiences on iOS rather than freemium stuff (I pay for premium Iphone games on the regular) but those level of games as a subscription? The well would have to be wide and deep to make me take on yet another sub…

Apple ending the App Store Affiliates Program sort of shows how iOS/Mobile gaming is evolving as a whole.

It’s so hard for premium games or ports from other platforms to make a worthwhile dint vs the F2P & shovelware that comes out nowadays. Mobile a few years ago felt like a really exiting horizon and part of an evolution of what the GameBoy used to fulfil. The Goldrush days for premium games on iOS seem to be over now however for all but a few select developers. Even then, front page promotion can be make or break for small studios. Apple still doesn’t really care about these experiences over grabbing a percentage and having a flashy graphical demo they can wheel out every so often on a keynote. Curation and promotion are still as big a problem as they ever were.

Touch Arcade reporting and content has mostly pivoted away from more thoughtful pieces towards a swarth of positive reviews of shallow F2P games and less deep reporting or critical pieces. Touch Arcade have said this is because it’s what gets clicks. This is the content people want. And I 100% believe them. It’s reflected in the App Store as well. Apple only caring about their own promotion and curation of their market place doesn’t surprise me. Of course they want that control.

There’s a huge market for ‘gaming’ on mobile. It just no longer sync’s up with what older, more traditional gamers expect for the most part. F2P, Gatcha & Paid Advertising experiences don’t need to be written about or scored in the same way as larger, story based/premium games. If everything is surface deep, there’s nothing to dive into and discuss anymore.

As 2018 rolls on, Touch Arcade has probably become a relic itself of the market it chose to report on as gaming on mobile evolves.

🐻Bear 1.5 dropped today with a whole bunch of changes, including official archive support! 🎉

Bear is an integral part of my notetaking workflows for business and personal use. I realised pretty early on when using it that I needed an archive feature to stop getting overwhelmed with notes that I may need to refer to but that aren’t of importance to me right now.

So… I wedged in my own archiving method into Bear! I was looking forwards to replacing it with a more ‘official’ method. Unfortunately, they way it’s been implemented sadly doesn’t match my way of archiving things. 😞

It’s all about the tags

Tags are great in Bear. They’re part of what makes it so flexible and usable for a huge array of writing topics. I primarily use my archive for work, but have had some personal content archived after dead personal projects (Notes on housework projects, researching purchases etc)

Currently my workflow for professional projects is to

• Tag with My Client > Their client > Project for live projects I’m working on. Then there may be sub-tags dependant on what the project entails. (Audit notes, contact notes, meeting notes and so on)

• When finished, I add _Archive as a tag at the front of the tag path, Essentially moving it to its own tree. Importantly, this keeps rest of the the tag hierarchy intact and browsable.

_Archive
    > My Client
        > Their Client 
            > Live Project 
                > Notes
                                                                  
My Client
    > their Client
        > Live Project 
            > Notes

So, My Client>Their Client>Project as a tag turns into _archive>My Client>Their Client>Project as I work through projects and file them away.

If I need to refer to notes from a previous project I can expand my _archive tree in the category menu and utilise my tags, browsing just like with my live notes! If it’s live or archive, they behave the same 👍

Bears official archive method

Unfortunately Bears archive folder doesn’t honour tags. It’s just a flat structure.

It will search tags within the archive but that means I would have to remember all my project/customer tags in my head rather than just be able to browse them. That’s kinda part of what I rely on Bear to do. Clear my brain of this stuff and present it to me.

This also means I can’t use any of the archive shortcuts now in the app. :(

The structure of the official archive is

Archive
     > Every Archived Note in the list from every level
                         
My Client
    > Their Client
        > Live Project 
            > Notes

I’m not sure why the decision was made to have the archive not honour tag structure. It’s a major part of what makes Bear so useful as a collection of notes. I guess it’s just a design decision to have the archive work this way 🤷‍♂️

There’s no real downside to using my ‘unofficial’ archive method still apart from missing out on the shortcuts to send directly to archive and not being able to use an archive type icon (as it’s reserved for the official archive naturally)

I really hope Bear does add tag visibility to the archive in a future update, at least as a behaviour toggle. Then it really would be perfection 👌